Mindful Music Listening Instruction Increases Listening Sensitivity and Enjoyment

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of mindful listening instruction on music listening sensitivity and music listening enjoyment. A pretest–posttest control group design was used. Participants, fourth-grade students (N = 42) from an elementary school in a large city in the Northeastern United States, were randomly assigned to two groups, Mindful Listening and Control. Both groups received instruction using the same lessons. Students in the Mindful Listening group received slightly different listening instructions designed to promote mindful listening. Results indicated that mindful listening instruction yielded higher scores (p < .05) for music listening sensitivity and music listening enjoyment. Suggestions for designing mindful listening activities are presented.

Keywords

listening listening enjoyment listening sensitivity mindfulness music

Music listening is an integral component of all phases of music education. Teaching students how to listen to music in a way that will enable them to become sensitive listeners and to enjoy the act of listening to music is vital. While some research exists on attention in music listening, as well as music listening instructional strategies in general (Abril & Flowers, 2007; Flowers, 2001; Flowers & O’Neill, 2005), no study has yet examined the use of mindfulness as a method to enhance student listening.

Mindfulness is the process of noticing subtle changes in the present moment (Langer & Moldoveanu, 2000). The mindfulness technique used to encourage mindful listening in the current experiment was one of associative listening (Gruhn, 1995/1996). By instructing students to create a story to accompany the music as they heard it, it was postulated that students would be more likely to keep their attention on the music, thereby increasing mindfulness while listening. The following review includes relevant information from music listening literature and mindfulness literature. The mindfulness literature review in this article draws on Langer’s (1989) construct of mindfulness, as this construct is the one used in this study.

Related Listening Research

Discovering methods to enhance student listening sensitivity and enjoyment is important, and no research yet has investigated mindfulness as a means of enriching student listening experiences. However, some existing research provides meaningful contexts for exploring mindfulness in listening. For example, Hedden (1973) and Hargreaves and Colman (1981) classified music listening strategies into cognitive and associative and objective analytic and affective, respectively. These categories basically differentiate between those listeners who interpret what they hear by way of emotional or nonmusical associations with the music and those who interpret what they hear by way of music analysis (such as form, theme recurrence, etc.). Smith’s (1987) research explained that the major difference between musically untrained and musically trained listeners was whether the listener employed a referential (also called associative) approach to understanding what they heard or a syntactic (also called objective analytic) approach to understanding what they heard. Bamberger (1991, 1994) studied the written representations that listeners created and concluded that figural and formal written representations likely correspond to referential and syntactic approaches to listening. Other researchers have investigated children’s responses to music listening and have reported similar findings. For example, Rodriguez and Webster (1997) examined the verbal responses of kindergarten through fifth-grade students to music listening experiences; among their findings, the authors noted distinct tendencies of response based on student age.

Before listeners can form analytical listening strategies, it is likely that listeners must form associative listening strategies. Gruhn (1995/1996) studied the influence of instructing high school students to create a narrative, associative listening story on student engagement. It is important that listeners build adequate mental representation networks in order to make sense of the music they hear (Patel, 2008). Associative listening strategies, such as listeners creating a listening story, build the mental representation necessary for a foundation of music listening development.

Patel (2008) presented a concept of a representational network that aligns well with Gruhn’s (1995/1996) study. Patel made a convincing case for a shared syntax processing between language and music, called the Shared Syntactic Integration Research Hypothesis (SSIRH). Patel argued that music and language share syntactic processing, but each has different representation systems in the brain. Custodero (2010) stated that “contemporary scholars attribute meaning making to a sense of narrative—stories and systems drawn from the complexities of [student] experience” (pp. 78–79). The concern of the current study is to promote students’ formation of associative mental representations by using the construct of mindfulness.

Related Mindfulness Literature

There are many different forms of mindfulness (cf. Bishop et al., 2004). Yeganeh (2006) classified the different forms of mindfulness into two distinct categories: meditative mindfulness and social–psychological mindfulness. Meditative mindfulness refers to the practice of mindfulness in the context of meditation, wherein individuals are instructed to bring their attention to an object, most commonly the breath. Then, while keeping their attention on the breath, they allow thoughts and emotions to occur without reacting to them (Kabat-Zinn, 2006). Social–psychological mindfulness refers to mindfulness in the midst of other activities. For example, when playing a scale on a musical instrument, one can mindfully notice the changes in the present moment. This study addresses the use of mindfulness as a strategy to enhance music teaching–learning effectiveness; no previous research on this topic was found.

Yeganeh (2006) thoroughly compared and contrasted social–psychological and meditative mindfulness drawing from research by Langer (1989) and Baer (2003). The most salient differences between the two can be summarized by examining the focus of attention and objective of each type of mindfulness. Social–psychological mindfulness most often involves an external focus of attention on a task in the external world. The objectives of social–psychological mindfulness are varied, but commonly include goal-oriented learning tasks and problem solving. Meditative mindfulness most often encompasses an internal focus of attention, often to the body or a bodily process such as breathing. The most common objective of meditative mindfulness is cultivating a sense of inner calmness by observing thoughts nonjudgmentally. Both social–psychological as well as meditative mindfulness emphasize awareness of the present moment and the intentional focus of attention of a particular sensation, thought, or thinking process. Additionally, both approaches stress the importance of cognitive flexibility and avoiding rigidity of perspective.

Research on social–psychological mindfulness has shown that mindfulness-based instruction can result in increased learning outcomes (Langer & Piper, 1987). Whitmore, DeMay, and Langer designed a study to investigate the effect of instruction emphasizing mindful learning in piano playing (as cited in Langer, 1997, p. 26). The authors recruited students for piano lessons through flyers advertising a free lesson. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of two groups: mindful learning condition or traditional learning condition. The instruction given was the same for both groups except that participants in the mindful learning group were also given mindful playing instructions, which encouraged them to change the style of their practice frequently and to attend actively to subtle variations they experienced while practicing.

They were reminded of this instruction midway through the lesson. The specific lesson was then taught, and the participants practiced the fingering exercises for 20 minutes. The control group was taught the same lesson, but without the above mentioned mindful playing instructions. Two graduate students in music with an extensive background in keyboard and compositional experience rated the playing of the participants during the lesson. The participants in the mindful learning group were rated as more competent and creative. Participants of both groups were also asked how enjoyable the lesson was, with the mindful learning group reporting a higher level of enjoyment. The current study shares a similar design, applied to music listening.

Langer, Russell, and Eisenkraft (2009) investigated mindfulness in the context of orchestral performance. Members of a university orchestra were used as performance participants, and members of a community chorus were used as listening review participants. The experimental group was instructed to be mindful of the present performance and find new and novel elements in the score and their performance. The musicians reported significantly more enjoyment during the experimental conditions, and they also reported that they felt successful in incorporating new nuances into the performance. The researchers used the question asking performers about success in having incorporated new nuances as an indirect means of measuring mindfulness, which is difficult to measure directly. Members of a community chorus who reviewed the recording of the performance preferred the mindful performance significantly over the traditional performance. Moreover, the investigators confirmed that musicians who mindfully engaged in performance by adding subtle nuances enjoyed playing more and provided higher performance ratings. In addition, musically literate listeners preferred the performance of the mindfully engaged orchestra. The authors suggested that mindfulness can be induced by way of experimental manipulation and does not require meditative practices.

Children are endowed with relatively precise listening skills from an early age (Montgomery, 1978), and different listeners adopt different listening strategies based on their level of listening expertise. In order to examine these findings more thoroughly, the purpose of the current study was to investigate mindful listening instruction as a method to enhance the high levels of musical listening discrimination and the nonexpert listening skills of fourth-grade students. The instructional approach used in this study promoted mindful listening through the use of narrative stories.

For the purposes of this study, listening sensitivity was defined as the ability to listen for subtle differences in musical elements and make judgments based on these differences, and listening enjoyment was defined as pleasure derived from listening to music, as reported by the listener. Though listening enjoyment and listening preference may be related, listening preference was not the variable under consideration and therefore was not examined in this study.

It was hypothesized, using directional hypotheses, that (a) inclusion of mindful listening instruction produces greater music listening sensitivity in students, and (b) inclusion of mindful listening instruction produces greater music listening enjoyment in students.

Method

All fourth-grade students (N = 42; 27 male and 15 female) from a single urban school in the Northeastern United States were placed into one of two groups through random assignment. Students received general music instruction for 45 minutes weekly with a music specialist. The study included one independent variable, type of listening instruction (mindful or traditional), and two dependent variables, music listening sensitivity and music listening enjoyment. One pretest, Gordon’s (1982) Intermediate Measures of Music Audiation (IMMA) was administered to ensure that the groups were equal with regards to music listening skills; additionally, demographic information was gathered using a Music Experience Questionnaire (MEQ). Two posttests, the Music Aptitude Profile (Gordon, 1965)–phrasing subsection (MAP-P) and the Anderson Test of Music Listening Sensitivity (ATMLS) measured the listening sensitivity dependent variable. One posttest, the Music Listening Questionnaire (MLQ), measured the listening enjoyment dependent variable. The study was approved by the institutional review board.

The researcher chose the phrasing section of the MAP (Gordon, 1965) for the following reasons: (a) it could easily be administered in a single 45-minute class, (b) it provided an appropriate spread of scores (as demonstrated in a pilot study for this research), and (c) the researcher considered the listening stimuli in the phrasing section as the most appropriate to the current study of the three musical sensitivity sections of the MAP. The stimuli of the phrasing section most closely corresponded to the construct of interest in the current study, as it presents the same phrase twice but with differences related to the musical phrasing of the playing.

The researcher-created ATMLS consists of 20 listening selections of Western instrumental music, each of which is played twice for the test taker. For some of the items, the two playbacks are identical, and for other items the two playbacks are of different recordings of the same musical composition (e.g., as played by two different orchestras). Test takers are told to listen to the 20 pairs of excerpts carefully and to indicate whether the two items of each pair are the same or different. Excerpts range from 12 to 30 seconds in length. The purpose of the ATMLS is to measure student ability to discriminate minor differences in actual recordings of music. As the ATMLS was designed to measure listening skills in a manner that is similar to the construct of interest in this study, it was included for measuring listening sensitivity. The ATMLS was developed using a similar test created by Prince (1977) called the Discrimination of Complex Musical Events (DCME) as a model. However, the DCME was designed for use with adults, not children, and is no longer available for use. The ATMLS was pilot-tested with nonparticipating fifth graders (N = 22). Revision was made after the testing and according to the item analysis of the resulting scores. Five music educators served as experts to evaluate the content validity of the test, and all agreed that the ATMLS is a useful measure of music listening sensitivity. The reliability of the ATMLS was Cronbach’s α = .61.

Procedures

The pretest–posttest control group experimental design was used for this study. After the pretest (IMMA) and MEQ had been administered to all participants, participants were placed randomly in either the experimental group (n = 22) or the control group (n = 20). Randomization was ensured by assigning each student a number, then using a computer to randomly place numbers into one of two groups. Participants were unaware of any differences between the treatment and control groups. The students were from the two different fourth-grade classes in the school. Both classes were pooled together for randomization of individual students into the experimental or control group. During each class, each group (mindful or control) had the required time for the treatment while the remaining students in the class were given a different activity, which was led by a teaching assistant.

The experiment required 12 weekly classes: 1 for the pretest, 10 for the listening lessons, and 1 for the posttest. Table 1 lists the music used in this study. All 10 lessons were adapted from lessons in the Share the Music (Bond, 2003) textbook series. For each lesson, both groups heard each musical excerpt twice, though the second playback was sometimes with the same performing group and sometimes with a different performing group. In other words, for each piece, the second listening excerpt may have been exactly the same as the first or may have been a different recording (e.g., with a different orchestra playing the same musical score). All 10 lessons included listening instruction for both groups, but the experimental group also received mindful instruction. All lessons lasted approximately 12 minutes. In this study, all lessons were drawn from the Share the Music textbook series (Bond, 2003) to ensure appropriateness and were also field-tested with children. As regards lesson content, each of the lessons taken from Share the Music varied slightly, but in general, each consisted of the teacher briefly introducing to the students the main themes of the music to be heard. The themes were introduced by asking students to sing the themes back after the teacher had sung them or to clap the rhythm of the themes after the teacher had introduced the rhythm. Instrumentation of themes was discussed in some lessons. Instructional time prior to listening lasted about 4 minutes for both the treatment and control groups. No additional time was used for instruction in the treatment group; the mindful listening instructions were included in the overall instructional time.

Table 1.

Student Treatment Schedule.

	Listening lesson content (shared for experimental and control groups)	Same/different recordings
Week 1: Pretests	IMMA, MEQ
Week 2: Lesson 1	Troika from Lieutenant Kijé Suite by Prokofiev; MLQ	Same
Week 3: Lesson 2	Promenade from Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky; MLQ	Different
Week 4: Lesson 3	Shrovetide Fair, excerpt from Petrushka by Stravinsky; MLQ	Same
Week 5: Lesson 4	Hoedown, excerpt by Copland; MLQ	Different
Week 6: Lesson 5	String Quartet, Op. 33, No. 3, Fourth Movement by Haydn; MLQ	Same
Week 7: Lesson 6	Slavonic Dance Op. 46, No. 8, excerpt, by Dvořák; MLQ	Same
Week 8: Lesson 7	Trumpet Concerto in E-Flat, First Movement by Haydn; MLQ	Same
Week 9: Lesson 8	Fanfare for the Common Man, by Copland; MLQ	Different
Week 10: Lesson 9	Polonaise in A Major, Op.40, No. 1, by Chopin; MLQ	Different
Week 11: Lesson 10	Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, Third Movement, by J. S. Bach; MLQ	Different
Week 12: Posttests	ATMLS, MAP-P

Note. IMMA = Intermediate Measures of Music Audiation by Gordon (1982); MEQ = Music Experience Questionnaire; MLQ = Music Listening Questionnaire; ATMLS = Anderson Test of Music Listening Sensitivity; MAP-P = Music Aptitude Profile–phrasing subsection by Gordon (1965); Listening lesson content, such as musical excerpts and the MLQ, was the same for the experimental and control groups each week. Only the type of listening instruction differed.

While both groups were exposed to the same musical lesson content, the experimental group was also given mindful listening instruction. The researcher designed the instructions given to the mindful listening treatment group to promote mindful listening. The instructions were designed based on the recommendations of Ellen Langer (namely of using the idea of a listening story and of playbacks with differing performing groups) during a personal communication (August, 2010). In addition, the researcher had successfully used the listening story strategy as a method to promote mindful listening in prior pilot research. Participants did not share their stories with classmates, as these mental products were intended to represent individual, personal responses to the musical stimuli. See Table 2 for specific details about listening instruction.

Table 2.

Listening Instructions for Lessons.

Group	Instruction
Mindful listening	First playback: “When two different people read the same book aloud, they are saying the same thing, but they sound different. It is similar with music. Two groups of musicians might play the same music, but it will sound slightly different. For example, some parts might be louder or softer. You will now hear one musical composition played twice. It may be played by the same group of musicians both times, or it may be a different group of musicians for each of the two times.”
	“Listen to this music. Pretend it tells you a story. Try to find out if this music tells a story to you. Your story may be completely different than the story of others, and that is okay. Make sure you notice how the story changes through the beginning, middle, and end. For example, if your story has a boy in it, was he perhaps calm, happy, or sad at the beginning? Did he change in the middle, perhaps becoming sleepy? Did he change even more at the end of the music? You will hear the music performed two times. Remember, each performance may have a different group of musicians playing.”
	Second playback: [Teacher instructs students using lesson, as scripted from the textbook.]
	“Please listen once more to the music.”
Control	First playback: “Please listen carefully to the following music.”
	Second playback: [Teacher instructs students using lesson, as scripted from the textbook.]
	“Please listen once more to the music.”

The definition of mindfulness, according to Langer and Moldoveanu (2000), is “the process of noticing novel distinctions” (p. 1). Langer et al. described the characteristics of mindfulness as (a) openness to novelty, (b) alertness to distinction, (c) sensitivity to different contexts, (d) implicit, if not explicit, awareness of multiple perspectives, and (e) orientation in the present (e.g., Langer, 1997; Langer & Moldoveanu, 2000; Sternberg, 2000). The instructions for the mindful group engaged the five characteristics of mindfulness delineated in this definition. The instructions encouraged “openness to novelty” and “alertness to distinction” through explaining the analogy of how two people may read the same book aloud slightly differently and that this also applies to the ways musicians perform music. The instructions supported the dimensions of “sensitivity to different contexts” and “awareness of multiple perspectives” through noting that students may have created completely different stories to accompany the music, and that this is acceptable. “Orientation in the present” was encouraged by asking students to notice any changes throughout the beginning, middle, and end, which promoted sustained attention to the music throughout the duration of playback.

The MLQ was given at the end of each lesson. Students rated their enjoyment of the lesson according to the following questions: (a) “how much have you enjoyed listening to the music we’ve heard together in this lesson?” and (b) “how much would you like to hear this music again in the future?”. Students responded to each of the questions using a 7-point Likert-type scale: a response of 1 indicated did not enjoy, and a response of 7 indicated enjoyed very much. The correlation between the two questions on the MLQ, each designed to measure music listening enjoyment, was r = .93 (p < .001). An analysis of internal reliability of the MLQ using the data collected in this study resulted in Cronbach’s α = .92.

Results

The pretest results, which were based on participants’ scores obtained on Gordon’s (1982) IMMA, indicated no statistically significant differences between the experimental and control groups, t(38) = 0.22, ns. The results of the MEQ are reported in Table 3.

Table 3.

Demographic and Statistical Data.

	Experimental (n = 22), M (SD)	Control (n = 20), M (SD)	Cohen’s d
Gender, %
Female	41	30
Male	59	70
Age	9.14 (0.56)	9.20 (0.41)
Instrumental ensembles	0.13 (0.47)	0.25 (0.79)
Choral ensembles	0.18 (0.85)	0.25 (0.55)
Private lessons	0.27 (0.77)	0.35 (0.81)
IMMA	67.41 (5.64)	67.00 (6.25)
MAP-P	41.05 (7.85)	35.65 (6.98)	0.73
ATMLS	14.09 (1.93)	11.45 (2.78)	1.10
ENJOY	5.67 (1.51)	4.33 (1.41)	0.92

Note. IMMA = Intermediate Measures of Music Audiation scores (fourth-grade pretest; possible range: 0–80); MAP-P = Music Aptitude Profile–phrasing subsection scores (possible range: 16–80; scores reported here are based on normative data for age from the test manual); ATMLS = Anderson Test of Music Listening Sensitivity scores (possible range: 0–20).

To investigate any significant differences on the posttest measurements of the dependent variables between the experimental and control groups, a multivariate analysis was used. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) test of differences between groups using the Pillai’s trace criteria was statistically significant, F(3, 38) = 0.40; p < .001. Follow-up univariate analyses of variance (ANOVA) yielded statistically significant differences between the experimental and control groups on all three measurements of the dependent variables: the ANOVA for music listening sensitivity as measured by the MAP-P, F(1, 40) = 5.49, p = .02; the ANOVA for music listening sensitivity as measured by the ATMLS, F(1, 40) = 13.00, p < .001; and the ANOVA for enjoyment, F(1, 40) = 8.74, p = .01. Effect sizes, computed using Cohen’s d, were large and notable. The effect size is a measurement of the magnitude of difference between the treatment group and the control group. Using Cohen’s d, the effect sizes were 0.73 for the MAP-P, 1.10 for the ATMLS, and 0.92 for enjoyment, as presented in Table 3. Therefore, the mindfulness treatment in this study had a large effect on the listening sensitivity and enjoyment of the subjects. With regard to reliability of posttest data, the reliability of the ATMLS was Cronbach’s α = .58.

Discussion

The results of the posttests support both research hypotheses: (a) inclusion of mindful listening instruction produces greater music listening sensitivity in students and (b) inclusion of mindful listening instruction produces greater music listening enjoyment in students. Results indicated that mindful listening instruction yielded higher posttest scores, which were statistically significant, for music listening sensitivity and music listening enjoyment, suggesting that fourth-graders’ music listening sensitivity can be altered based on instructional strategy.

Moreover, the effect of mindful listening instruction on music listening sensitivity and music listening enjoyment yielded effect sizes that were large enough to be of practical significance for music educators. In addition, it was found that the ATMLS is a useful assessment for measuring music listening sensitivity, though further refinement would likely produce more precise results. Furthermore, the MAP-P was used successfully to measure listening sensitivity as a dependent variable in this study. The correlation between the ATMLS and the MAP-P was statistically significant. Therefore, there may be a significant overlap in what is measured by the ATMLS and the MAP-P for fourth-grade students, suggesting possible evidence of concurrent validity for the ATMLS as a measure of music listening sensitivity.

The treatment used in this experiment is only one of many possibilities for designing curricular materials with the intent of engaging learners in mindful listening. Studying a phenomenon as elusive as mindfulness can present difficulties for the researcher. Mindfulness is an internal state of mind and hence is not something that can be concretely measured by an external observer. Advances in neuroscience may eventually allow researchers to monitor mindfulness in a quantitative manner by using brain imaging or measuring brainwave activity. However, it is not necessary to directly confirm the state of mind of individual participants in studies measuring the effects of mindfulness. Instead, researchers can design tasks that encourage mindful engagement and then measure the effect of those mindfulness-enhancing stimuli on groups. This approach to mindfulness research provides the researcher with a practical yet useful method for examining the effects of mindful engagement. The difficulty that remains in this research approach becomes how the researcher can ensure that a task indeed does encourage mindful engagement. The theoretical basis proposed by Ellen Langer (1989), as was used in this study, provides a conceptual framework from which the researcher can design tasks that promote the mindful engagement of research participants.

Langer’s (1989) construct of mindfulness can be used in future research projects, both quantitative and qualitative, to provide a theoretical basis for investigating the role of mindfulness on a broad range of results, including attitudes, learning, perceptual sensitivity, creativity, musical improvisation, and other variables. The instructional strategy used in this research is only one possible strategy for promoting mindful listening instruction. Other instructional strategies in listening (as well as other areas of teaching and learning in music education) using Langer’s framework could be devised and studied; doing so will enable researchers to assess the degree to which mindfulness theory meaningfully contributes to lesson design, which then may lead to increased learning outcomes for students. Additionally, the relationship between mindfulness and long-standing techniques for directed music listening could be examined.

Todd and Mishra (2013) reviewed the available literature on music listening instruction. Some traditional models of music listening instruction may have conceptual overlap with mindful listening instruction. In particular, Madsen and Geringer (2000/2001) developed a model of music listening that emphasizes the importance of student attentiveness to the music they hear. They proposed that focus of student attention is vital for meaningful music listening experiences. Madsen and Geringer recommended activities for students, such as tapping the beat or counting the marking the number of times a particular theme is heard in a musical excerpt, to encourage active listening. The attentive listening then leads to more refined aural discrimination in the model. Considered from the perspective of Madsen and Geringer’s model, mindful listening instruction, as defined and used in this study, could be conceptualized as an additional means for focusing student attentiveness while listening to music. Hence, some modes of traditional music listening instruction may resemble the model of mindful listening instruction presented here. An important difference between most traditional methods of music listening instruction and mindful listening instruction is that most traditional methods rely on an external activity, such as movement or marking the number of times a theme is heard, whereas mindful listening instruction relies primarily on an internal, or cognitive, activity for focusing student attention.

Several studies by Flowers et al. have investigated student self-awareness of distraction during music listening (Abril & Flowers, 2007; Flowers, 2001; Flowers & O’Neill, 2005). In these studies, students were asked to touch a computer touchpad when they realized they had become distracted and returned their attention to the listening task. Hence, students tapped the touchpad to indicate a return of attention after a period of inattentiveness or distraction. The studies indicated about one to five distractions per minute for middle school students. The researchers found the distraction frequency for individual students to be relatively stable over multiple attempts at the task, showing a level of consistency; however, differences between students for distraction frequency varied greatly. Additional studies using mindfulness-based listening instruction could integrate such measurement of self-awareness of distraction in order to explore the effect mindfulness-based listening instruction may have on student distraction during listening.

The enjoyment variable in this study was measured by student responses to a Likert-type scale of how much students enjoyed listening to the musical selection. Measuring enjoyment in this way may yield some overlap with music preference. In general, the available research has shown that familiarity (as in multiple experiences of hearing the same music) increases how much the listener enjoys listening to music (Gregory, 1994; Siebenaler, 1999). Therefore, the repeated listening experiences to some of the musical excerpts may have influenced student enjoyment. However, both the treatment and control group experienced the same number of repetitions of music listening excerpts, so this potential influence does not present a threat to the internal validity of this study. Additionally, familiarity may have a stronger impact on student enjoyment when students experience music through performance than through listening, though this has not yet been demonstrated (Droe, 2006).

Studies, possibly using qualitative methodologies, could be executed using the theoretical framework of mindfulness as presented by Ellen Langer. These studies could look at the experiential and phenomenological issues that could result from student engagement in mindfulness-based music lessons. Other methodologies, such as longitudinal studies that could examine long-term exposure to mindfulness-based music lessons, could also enhance understanding of the potential durability of such lessons. Studies that examine factors such as the potential interaction of individual learning styles and mindfulness-based instruction, the effect of mindful learning instruction with special needs students, and the effect of mindful learning instruction across a spectrum of age groups and demographics (including amount of prior instruction in music) would be useful additions to the literature on mindfulness-based instructional strategies.

The ATMLS was created for the purpose of data collection in this study making generalization of its use beyond the current context impossible. However, the instrument could be further refined into a useful tool for measuring listening sensitivity in other contexts. The validity and reliability of the test could be improved by including additional questions in future administrations of the test to find which questions are most useful and reliable. Future studies could address ways of maintaining validity while increasing reliability. In addition, future research could address the issues of sampling from a broader population, testing with nondirectional hypotheses and using comparison groups in order to advance the exploration of this topic.

The results of this study, in relation to educational practice, provide preliminary support for using mindfulness-based music listening instruction. The mindful learning instruction used in this study consisted of instructing students to create a listening story or narrative based on their associations with the music and of cueing students to the possibility that two consecutive playbacks of the same musical score may or may not have been by the same performing ensemble. These two tasks were framed in the theoretical context of social–psychological mindfulness, as presented by Ellen Langer. Teachers can incorporate the mindful listening treatment used in this study easily, as it requires very little extra preparation. Because of the ease of incorporating these instructions and the efficacy of the instructions on student outcomes, it is recommended that teachers include these instructions, or very similar ones, when presenting listening lessons to students. The study demonstrated that small changes in the instructional language of teachers can result in large differences in learning outcomes of students. The listening instructions used for the mindful listening group in this study encouraged student listening stories or narratives imagined by the students to accompany the music, thus connecting their listening with their emotional and associative cognitions.

No additional research on the effect of social–psychological mindfulness-based instruction on student learning outcomes in music is available. Hence, other instructions that still may meet the criteria for mindful instruction may not have the same effect. Nonetheless, the current study presents preliminary evidence that instructional methods using a mindfulness-based lesson design may be helpful in promoting learning.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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